Nioh Review

Finally, a game about being an Otaku

Talk about a journey! I started playing Nioh around about at the end of 2020 with the expectation of getting a review out by January in the following year. The fact that I'm here over a year later should clue you in a little bit to how I felt about this game and playing it. Although, if I also told you that the majority of my progress was made over the past month, especially in these last few days, that might paint my experience in a slightly different light. And that's because my feeling towards Nioh are so much more complicated then I ever expected when I happened upon this new fangled Soulslike all those years ago. What I wanted was a game that would fill that hole always left behind from the Dark Souls series; a hole which didn't quite get filled up with the fun, but perhaps a little too atypical for the genre to fit my tastes, Remnant: From Ashes. (I'll get back to that game in due time.) What I got was something uniquely fitting for the developers of the Ninja Gaiden games and, more recently, Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise. What I got was Nioh, for better and for worse.

I remember hearing about Nioh all those years ago when the game was first on the verge of doing it's marketing-mandated rounds, and I felt that buzz of static excitement generated from another AAA Soulslike title, only this one not being made by FromSoftware, indicating that this burgeoning little subgenre was on the verge of becoming a thing.  It shifted the fantasy themes from Medieval Europe to Edo period Japan and chunked new monstrous creativity in the design of this fictional interpretation of our world through the use of Yokai instead of various breeds of demon. None could know at the time whether Nioh would boast as masterfully interwoven a narrative as Souls did, or even if the layout of the game world would be anyway as intricate and Metroidvania-esque, but naiveté dictated that we would take all those boons for granted and assume those were just staples of a genre like this. Many years later, and after the release of a sequel, I've finally gotten around to playing the game to completion and thus I can say for certain: this isn't the type of game FromSoftware would make in a thousand years.

Actually it feels a bit weird even calling this game a Soulslike, because whilst it does boast that most basic of rules that a Soulslike needs to have, dropping your experience upon death to be reclaimed or lost in your next go around; everything else about the game seems to feed more into what Team Ninja has worked on in the past, rather that what the industry was trending towards. It almost feels like this game is only a Soulslike by circumstance, and we're doing the game a disservice by implying it's one of those many titles who's very impetus was sparked by Dark Souls. But maybe I'm wrong and the chain of influence does indeed exist, to that point all I can say is that is was not my ever enduring love for the Souls like genre that dragged me through this game. It was duty, sprinkled with the galling challenge of a game that dared tried to assert itself as tougher than my resolve.

A Samurai's path

Unlike with Dark Souls, Nioh doesn't present us with a fully open world tied together with lore-driven exploration and eye-opening path winding. Instead we are given a series of linear missions that we go through one-by-one, intersected with side missions that often take place within these exact same level layouts, merely swapping out objectives or having you go through the same linear route backwards. If that sounds a little bit repetitive to you, then you've honed in on one the key tenets of Nioh's design philosophy: Repetition. You'll find enemy archetypes being repeated so often that you can expect to see first area enemies in the finale, you'll find locations repeated in side quests across multiple areas and you'll even seen bosses repeated. This is a game that doesn't care about reusing it's own content to pad out the game with more content and that approach can get a little grating when you've hit a brick wall in the main story and the only way to level up is to grind away at seemingly generic side mission content.

But then maybe that level of repetition is somewhat reassuring given the deluge of otherwise impenetrable systems and subsystems which the game assaults you with in the early game with little to no explanation. Even after having mastered them all and completing the game as strong hybrid build, getting to the point where I understood everything that was at my disposal took ten's of hours and only really started to come together just before I played the DLC. Now one could argue this is indicative of my poor attention span, but I do actually have the patience to sit through pages and pages of how-to infomation in order to get to terms with a game; how else would I be playing an extended game of Kenshi right now? You see, from the deluge of guides on Youtube and forums touching in the various aspects of Nioh's systems, I'd say it's pretty clear the bigger problem here is the way the game dumps everything on you in short order and just expects you to work it out. Intuitive this game is not.

But what systems am I actually talking about here? Well first you've got the two currencies, Amrita and Gold, then you've got the three token systems, Samurai, Mage and Ninja points, then you've got the various weapon level trees that are separate for each class of weapon from Katana to Odachi, all of whom consume Samurai points and require heavy investment in order to buy skills for each of the three stances, High, mid and low. But remember that you can only assign one move to each button combination on each stance, so you'll have to pick and choose as your arsenal becomes more packed. There are also skills trees for Onmyo magic and Ninjutsu, but they're your more typical tree of 'unlock what you want with the points you earn' kind of set-up. (Although there is a limit on how much you can equip from what you've unlocked based on Stats.) Speaking of stats, like any RPG wannabe there's a full array of stats to be levelled up with slow buffs to various aspects of the game you will be working with from improving your stamina pool to hitting minimum stat requirements on equipment; and it all represents a power creep, although not nearly as much as the gear system does. Oh did I mentioned there's an MMO/Looter game style gear system in this game with gear levels, rarities and sets? Because Nioh has one of those as well. Did you understand all of that? Because that's just the basics.

I haven't mentioned the dual prestige systems that are tied to unlockable titles you earn through the game and give you tiny boosts to atypical game systems such as Item drop rate and Living weapon duration. The various blacksmithing functions, the extra 'Glory' currency which is used in the secret merchant menu in the Hidden Teacup in order to buy various cosmetics and random high-level gear, nor the concept of Living Weapons and their relevance both in passives and direct use. There's no doubt whatsoever that the breadth of Nioh's systems are deep and intertwined, but they're also dense and unwieldly, such that I'd not be surprised in the slightest if someone is introduced to the game, doesn't get into the paper-thin narrative and thus doesn't invest even an iota of the attention needed to absorb the novel's worth of infomation you need just to get to basic grips with in order to face everything the game is throwing at you. If there's ever an example of a game that perhaps has too much going on, its Nioh.

The Last Samurai  

Yes even as I say that, the actual moment-to-moment gameplay of Nioh, outside of all the extra bells and whistles, is supremely fun and easy to get to grips with. Built on the aforementioned bones of several different weapon types and multiple stances, fighting has an simple-to-grasp strategy about it as you can manage your low stance, which hits fast but weak, medium stance, which absorbs blocks the best and hits decently, and High stance, which hits the hardest but winds up slowly. They mark just enough complexity to be relevant throughout your entire play experience, whilst being intuitive enough to be easy to pickup to new players. There's also the Living Weapon mode which acts as a kind of Demon Trigger function. You build up charge for this ability by killing trash mobs before activating it in a spectacular burst wherein your guardian spirit bursts forth with an invincible gale of carnage that lasts 10-20 seconds. At the beginning of the game it's kind of a push-to-win button, but later on it slows down into more of a 'get out of jail free card' for when things are looking dire. Throw atop of all that the extended status effect abilities, tied to Ninjutsu and Onmyo magic, which will become imperative in the late game, and you have quite the fine suite of combat tools here to fight the various monsters and bosses the game lays out before you. If only there was more individual enemy variety to compliment all of this.

If I were to summarise all of Nioh's problems in one concise umbrella, I'd say that they mostly come down to this game being too long. Far too long. With the amount of enemies this game has to throw at you, stretched out over nearly 100 hours of playtime, (including the DLC) the gameplay manages to keep everyone around just long enough to become stale. Killing zombies and Yokai Brutes is fun and challenging when you've stumbled upon more than you expected and have to cleverly pick them off whilst ducking and weaving around the fishing village from the first level, but when you're dragging yourself across the fifteenth battlefield, dispatching enemies of roughly the same composition with a few new variants (or very occasionally, new enemy types) chucked in there, even the solid gameplay can't shake the onset of 'nothing substantial has changed'. "Oh, this brute is Red now and has one more new move... groovy."

What I think the team needed to do was cut down on the length, rip out on an area or two around the middle where the story starts to really sag, and put that development time into making different moment-to-moment challenges to replace the infantry of the late game, rather than just supplement them. In the final two areas of the base game, Nioh begins to get to grasps with this and you'll have the odd mission with entirely atypical enemies, but by that point I'm already so used to the repetition that the design move more feels like a fluke. And there are also the many repeated bosses, which just made me groan everytime they reared their ugly heads again. Imagine doing a boring side mission with a goal you don't care about, just in order to make some extra levels or get better gear, and then the final boss of this little side quest is that same annoying bird boss who screwed you over all the way back in mission 2. Only this time she has more health. That's not a hypothetical, this happens in-game. It feels cheap and like another artificial stopper that increases playtime for another 30 minutes or so.

The Gear Game

And whilst we're on the topic of hot-takes, how about I rant about possibly the most divisive essential ingredient in this entire game: the gear grind. Yes, for some inane reason Nioh has your typical looter-game grind loot with rarities, random stat boosts, sets and gear level recommendations- and I just don't think it has a place in a Soulslike game. At it's core, these difficulty stroking Souls game are all about the challenge of overcoming tough enemies through learning what makes them tick. Your progress through these games is mostly dependent on the intrinsic value that you gain from learning attack patterns and invincibility frame windows and elemental weaknesses and everything of that nature. Most all of those games also have RPG stats so that you can grow stronger in the background and feel like you are getting more powerful as well as smarter, but the focus is always on the improvement of the player behind the controller. Nioh just throws levelled gear at you all day.

For every single mission in Nioh, you'll find enemies who play exactly the same as they did last level, but with slightly buffed health or damage, requiring the player to engage in a constant arms race of digging up new gear with a slightly bigger meaningless number attached to it just to even the playing fields. It feels vapid and ill-fitted to the genre we're working with, and I think this point is best embodied in the fact that all the sets and random buffs you get along the main quest are worthless, because it's all for gear you'll be throwing out come next mission. Sure, you can choose to Soul Match equipment at the forge in order to drag gear you like with you up the level grind, but that process becomes so prohibitively expensive for even the slightest level increment in the late game that it becomes wholly redundant.

Now I don't mean to imply that the idea of having various different armour sets with rolled stats and actual set bonuses isn't inherently a decent idea; because I totally think it is. Dark Souls games famously have armour stats that are so inconsequential beyond their raw protection and weight that most high level players just treat the entire mechanic as a dress-up wardrobe mode. Fashion Souls, as it's known. Nioh makes gear stats that matter, which you want to seek out to improve your overall efficiency with meaningful buffs, but the level creep invalidates all that by making gear sets depreciate after every thirty minutes. And at no point does this early game issue become more apparent then after you reach the endgame, when gear stops levelling.

That's right. At level 150 the level creep stops and whilst enemies are still getting stronger, you match it by ascending the gear you have rather than seeking more powerful replacements. And suddenly, hark, the gear stats feel meaningful, you spend that extra time reforging stats to get your ideals, you find that bonus collection which buffs all the right areas. Maybe you have to partake in the handy 'refashion' mechanic which allows you to remodel a piece of armour to look like something else whilst completely retaining the stats of the original gear. (I needed that feature so much, thank god they have it.) For the DLC, the process of getting powered up was actually decently fun as I could actually feel myself getting better with the tools I was using, seeing those larger damage output numbers and resisting more impacts, rather than just assuming I must be getting stronger because the game says that I am. So in the words of Peacemaker: the Gear system of Nioh is a chode. A grower, not a shower.

Path of the wise

Judging the world of this game, and the way that Nioh handles it's level design, is another balancing between 'great!' and 'meh.' You get to tread all over various regions of Japan from the beaches of the south to the famous Azuchi Castle in the Omi region, and all of it looks pretty decent. Sure, maybe you spend a bit too much time trudging around at night so you can't enjoy everywhere like you might want to, but there is diversity in location here, much more so than there is in enemy variety at least. However, the way Nioh chooses to turn these world spaces into levels really confuses me. Because, and bear in mind I know how this sounds after how I complained the length of this game, some of these locations feel insubstantial. Others have just enough travelling and intelligent design to them, with lots of visual markers to indicate progress and secret areas with loot, or pathways that double back around to a handy shrine; but then there's some mission inbetween where you just have to cross a couple of courtyards, go around a short cave system and bam; boss, level over.

I think that if we circle back around to what I said on the length of this game, maybe if the team had consolidated their efforts into a smaller number of levels there would have been a better opportunity to expand individual levels into something more satisfying with a 'sense of journey' to them. Heck, Nioh didn't even need to cut out any bosses, they could have just rolled them into the other levels to serve as mid-level fights. That would have helped these missions feel a lot less formulaic too. And perhaps even the odd mechanic change to the level would make them stand out for something other than the texture draped over hallways you're fighting across... maybe I'm speaking a bit out of turn here, but I feel that maybe some corners were cut in favour of quantity.

Pledge of Demon

We can't get very far into a blog about a Soulslike game without dedicating a section to one of the genre's most core elements; the bosses that they choose to throw at us. Nioh bases a lot of it's boss designs on famous mythological Yokai, from Ogres to Nine-tailed Foxes and gross centipede things inbetween. And in my opinion I think a lot of these bosses are very cool, but also a lot more deadly then their counterpart games. There's some midgame bosses that will straight one-shot the average player with a single grapple move, other's that hit so fast and hard that the player needs to try and not get so much as tapped more than twice, and every single boss has multiple phrases. For a veteran of the subgenre this is very exciting, to have a cadre of bosses that go at you with no breaks, but I can imagine a new comer being overwhelmed very quickly.

Of course, as the game goes on and you become more powerful the fights by-and-large get easier to the point where it almost feels like the game doesn't know how to adapt to more versatile players. Most bosses can be effectively nullified simply by stocking up on Sloth Talisman's with a little Living Weapon garnish, and for the DLC I remember only the penultimate boss being even remotely troubling to me. (Not only did I beat the last boss on my first run, I even accidentally stumbled into the fight room without preparing first- by all rights I should have been stomped.) That being said, if you choose to humble yourself and not harness the many systems and status effects of the game to godmode each boss, you'll find a selection of really cool and fast-paced fights. I mean sure, a lot of the more humanoid fights break exactly down into 'enemy does rush barrage and you dash behind them', but the adrenaline and pace of movesets, along with the shifting phases, never keeps any new boss feeling stale. Heavy emphasis on 'new'.

I've mentioned it before, but Nioh recycles bosses a lot. Like, absolutely too much. Even when Dark Souls 2 bought back the Smelter Demon for the DLC and changed it's element- that felt lazy, but Nioh doesn't even go the distance of changing enemy elements. No, Team Ninja literally throw the same fight at you with more health and damage just because they hate you. The finale of the base game, and I'm trying not to spoil anything here but honestly they sort of spoiled the ending themselves by even implementing this, tasks you with fighting 4 old early game bosses before you can even look upon the thematic end-of-game bosses. That is a garishly obtuse way of spreading out your final quest to be longer, and personally I just find the prospect of putting down the same four Yokai more annoying than exciting or rewarding. 

The Path of Nioh

Spoilers for the main story in this section

Nioh tells the story of an Irish privateer called William during the late years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. He is wrapped up in a conspiracy involving a slew of plot points that are thrown at the player and weakly explained, before finding himself chasing a bald-tattooed cultist named Kelly all the way across the world to Japan in order to... well, he wants to... as far as I can tell, for the vast majority of this narrative William has the exact same goal he's given at the end of the first mission, and that's to recover a magical spirit he's had with him since childhood that Kelly absconded with for some reason or other. That is his only driving compunction and it's not once updated until the final few missions of this 50-hour game. Several times William is tasked with doing things that don't even remotely help him towards that goal, which he'll do anyway just because he's the protagonist. Perhaps this might hint at my problems with Nioh's story and the reason why the beginning had such a trouble grasping me: The narrative at the beginning of the game is weak. 

The reason for this is very clear, because Team Ninja wanted to use this game as a sightseeing tour across the latter parts of the Edo period and have the player, through William, visit all the classic locations and battles of the time. Because of this, William is shoved around from meeting Tokugawa Ieyasu in one scene, to being one of his advisors in the next without any real meaningful process of character development. Famous figures fly by the story at such a rate you hardily remember or care about them, and even for someone who actually knows a good bit of lore from this time (Yes, I was a little excited when Ieyasu showed up) most of these plot developments feel utterly hollow. William doesn't appear to have any connection to events as they happen, because he's busy chasing Kelly, and every time we have to go off and clear out a tower of an Icy demoness or infiltrate a besieged castle to save someone who sacrifices themselves anyway; it just feels like we're on a meaningless side quest.

All I can really say in favour of the otherwise weightless narrative, is that William does eventually tie himself into the stakes of the world, although it happens in literally the penultimate mission of the base game. (A bit late to decide everything you've spent the past year doing is, in fact, part of your ultimate goal) Oh, that and the fact that this game is set during Ieyasu's reign, which means they narrowly avoided doing what every Japanese video game across all time does and having the final boss just be Oda Nobunaga. He's the literal demon king, he appears in everything; even Zelda based Ganon on Oda Nobunaga. So I appreciate this game taking the high road an- oh, they just resurrected him at the very end him for a last boss fight... wizard...

The Journey continues

So if I was to sum up my thoughts on Nioh there it would be an overall average game that has shimmers of greatness to it that are averaged back down by strange levelling choices, weak narrative writing and a vast overextension of content to make the gametime longer. But in summarising this early I wouldn't be doing my due diligence, because there are three DLC packs to the game which sum up the rest of William's journey in his return to Japan. At this point, honestly, I was actually growing to dislike Nioh. The initial fruits had long soured and the challenging bosses were becoming a slog to get to and, in some cases, proved a slog to fight. I was actually upset about the fact that the DLC added around 8 more missions onto the game and just wanted to get this whole journey over with. And would you look at that; the DLC won me over again.

Just about every issue I had with Nioh, the weak writing, the repetitive levels, the annoying levelled gear, was resolved by these DLC adventures that fully realised the potential this base game showed glimmers off. Good thing I waited until the full version of this game, because I don't think I would have come back just to play them if I'd left things with the ending of the base game. Which isn't to say everything is sunshine and rainbows now, gear ascension is so steep that grinding is necessary and the writing is only just 'good' now, instead of substandard, but the writing doesn't need to be brilliant to sell a game which plays this well and when I'm grinding for bonuses to equipment I'm wearing and can feel myself growing more powerful, so I can enjoy that grinding process.

Throwing us forward some years, Nioh's DLC reveals the later years of William's struggle to bring peace to Japan (that was the purpose he sporadically decided he wanted to have near the end of the main narrative) and introduces some new villains. But these villains, shocker, actually appear in the story regularly, and spell out their motivations so you can engage with them as actual characters. Whatsmore, each mission is sprawling and unique, sometimes offering new enemy types, othertimes offering new mechanics entirely, and best of all- every mission has us make tangible progress towards the goal of the story, so it doesn't feel like we're going on side quests all of the time! (With the exception of the actual side quests, of course.)

The DLC stories do tend to jump around a bit in years, to the point where it feels like we're missing huge chunks of William's life without being told what happened, (according to Nioh 2, William went and got married and had a kid, but neither Okatsu nor this child even make cameos in the last DLC) but I'm understanding the characters I'm interacting with and recognising William's stake in everything. Truly, the DLC of Nioh made me really change my tune on the Nioh experience to the point where now, incredibly, I actually want to play Nioh 2 to see how Team Ninja evolved their craft further. And, of course, the DLC forced me to engage with Nioh's endgame which, unlike the grind to get there, was actually fun. Did I reform my opinion on Nioh enough to try out the no-less-than four New Game Plus mode? No, god no- not even close. But I'll look up the sequel, so that's worth something.

In Summary

Nioh is about as uneven as a seasaw with the way it jumps from mediocre to greatness, and I found myself at times really disliking and really enjoying the experience to equal measures. Unfortunately, a lot of it's best content and where the game really starts to come together, is near the very endgame of the playthrough when you finally understand all the systems you're working with and the much more consistently competent DLC quests start up, which is going to be far too little too late for most people interested. I can't just sit here and recommend people stick out tens of hours of shaky ground because "it gets really good in hour 70!", because that's just unfair to the player and their time. But if you can limit your expectations, find something to love in the gameplay and hold onto that, I'll say your persistence will be rewarded with an endgame so good you'll wish the whole game was like that! I wish so too, which is why despite all the quality systems and genuine good ideas that make this game stand out, I can't really see myself grading Nioh with anymore than a C Grade. Do I want the tens of hours I spent in the midgame back? Kinda. And although I have hopes for Nioh 2, if I see it starting to slip into the same old habits I am ready to drop it like a stone because there are so many much more consistent Soulslikes out there, it's something of a diamond-subgenre right now.